Aviya Kushner is the Forward’s language columnist and the author of Wolf Lamb Bomb and The Grammar of God.
Aviya Kushner
By Aviya Kushner
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Culture How Putin and Trump loyalists are illegitimately redefining the word legitimate (and language itself)
The word “legitimate” is suddenly hot — and it’s being increasingly used to justify the unjustifiable. In the recent rare and unified front of Republicans and Democrats, rushing to sanction Russia as it begins an invasion of Ukraine, it may be convenient to stop thinking about the Republican National Committee’s statement that the Jan. 6…
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Culture Like a young Trump in training, the Tinder Swindler is manipulating the media for political gain
The Netflix documentary tells us more than you'd think about journalism and politics
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Culture On the far right, there are no contradictions, only virulent antisemitism — a front-row view of Charlottesville
The dramatic 16-day courtroom trial, which ended with a whopping $26 million in damages assessed to more than a dozen individual white supremacists and hate groups for their role in the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, also offered a window onto what’s really happening inside today’s far right. Among the courtroom observers…
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Culture Why Jews are literally ‘the people of Thanksgiving’
Jews are linguistically rooted in gratitude; the word for Jew in Hebrew is directly tied to the word for thankfulness
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Culture Jews are under siege on campuses and in college towns — where’s the outrage? Where are the intellectuals?
Anyone remotely affiliated with universities should be chilled by the news that a Torah was destroyed at a fraternity house at George Washington University. The image of a replica Torah scroll — ripped apart and doused in laundry detergent, its pages on the floor — is the very latest in a series of increasingly disturbing…
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Culture No, George Soros doesn’t control school boards — these antisemitic conspiracy theories need to stop
The danger of conspiracy theories is that they can become mainstream thinking in the blink of an eye. That’s what’s happening right now in the governor’s race in Virginia, where Republican nominee Glenn Youngkin is in a tight race with former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe. Youngkin has blamed George Soros — the Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire…
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Culture They saw the Afghanistan debacle coming long before everyone else
The world was shocked by images of desperate Afghans cramming into Kabul’s airport and hanging on to planes — but the world’s translators have been fearing this outcome for quite some time. In April, 22 translation organizations sent an open letter to Secretary of State Anthony Blinken outlining the danger they sensed. The email was…
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Culture We need to keep talking about the Sbarro bombing
Twenty years ago this week, I watched a bride have her wedding pictures taken along the water in Jaffa. As the photographer clicked and clicked, the radio blared from a nearby car with the doors open. I will always remember that white car, the two front doors open, the news of the Sbarro bombing, the…
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